"Long before the coming of the World Wide Web, the Minitel provided a sort of internet-in-one-country. Long before Facebook, Google or Twitter - millions of French people went 'online' daily to search for information, to book their holidays, chat to strangers or seek cheap (or not so cheap) sexual thrills."

You yourself more or less assigned CERN to one specific country in the first post...

Also,

the web was invented in the 90s, the internet has been around several decades longer

not really / depends what we mean by "internet" - Internet Protocol for example has been really around a decade longer. And while it built on some earlier "decades" old networks - most of them weren't quite it yet (and some which were quite similar, like the mentioned nearby CYCLADES - yeah, French - didn't leave direct descendants)